We live in a marvelous and frightening age…

I am among the last of the Baby Boomers. My birthday, ironically on Election Day, takes me one year away from 50, meaning there have been almost 50 years since the end of the Baby Boom itself. Most of us couldn’t begin to conceive of life after 30 but are preparing to receive our AARP cards and looking at retirement or are already there.

In just the time since I arrived on our planet, we have gone from black and white television and transistor radios to an unimaginable load of technology ranging from implantable microcomputers that help the deaf hear to space travel that is so commonplace people have stopped paying attention to each arrival at the International Space Station for supply runs and personnel transfers.

You would think by now we could look at our achievements at take them for what they are – marvels of human ingenuity and a reach toward a better world. And you would be right, for some of us. But how wrong it is for those of us who have nothing, still living in dirt-covered hovels that can barely be called home.

Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities launched HG Wells, Edward Bellamy, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and others into careers of writing – science fiction, fantasy, warnings of what might be in an imagined future – might not believe what we have today, nor how much of it we waste in frivolity or greed.

Rather than try and present all of the things I found today individually and thereby flooding your newsfeed, I present instead a series of items grouped under subject headings.